Life without AI
I lead the AI/ML practice in a fortune 100 company but I am so sick of AI now. There is so much hype and empty promises but little impact on the life that matters to us. I spent one hour bending and kneeling in my garden to pull out the weeds. My back hurts but no AI tool can help me get rid of them. I have piles of dirty dishes in the sink but no AI tool can help me put them into the dish washer. My washed clothes are still stacked in the baskets but no AI can help me organize them and put them nicely into my child’s room.
As I am physically tired and want to sit on my chair to write down the complains, the thought of that maybe AI will be able to write it better stings my brain. “You don’t need to write anymore. There’s voice to text capability now and AI can write articles.” I feel I am losing the right to any creative work now.
Since the release of ChatGPT, the crazy race on AI has been none stop. AI is supposed to release us from the mundane work so that we can enjoy doing the work that human crave. The opposite actually has happened. None of the laborious work has been replaced or even eased by AI. At the same time, with the rapid development and release of new models, tools, methodologies, and technologies, everyone has less personal time. The fear of falling behind the technology revolution makes us constantly following the news, reading the recently published papers (the Meta Llama 3 Herds of Models is 92-page long), studying the newly released models, taking online classes, trainings and boot camps, playing with the coolest techniques on personal computers when the company blocks the access to GenAI tools, but expect you to know what’s going on. At work, endless of POCs, experimentations, and vendor pitches have yet made any impact on the real business performance. All the money flows to those promising AI companies who are consuming societal resources, putting extra burden on the electric grid, causing faster global warning, and creating even bigger inequity between the wealthy country/groups and the disadvantaged populations. In this age of AI rush, we forget what business we are in, who we are serving, and why we are living. “AI can solve every problem!”
Over this Labor Day weekend, I haven’t touched anything related to AI. I read several paper books, played tennis, cleaned my yard, and watched a documentary movie in the theater. I feel I am living like a human again, not an AI-oriented human. I had plan to take another AI related course so that I can catch up, but the true enjoyment of humanly life has really driven me away from anything related to hi-tech.
Why are we willing to spend billions of billions of dollars to train the AI models, but unwilling to spend just a little more to educate and train people or to increase the school funding? Why do we give high valuation on the improvement of AI models, but pay little attention to the importance of human judgement, which grounds all the AI models. We want to use AI to lower the cost (from human), but we price AI higher than human.
I want to go back to the simple low tech life. Just sitting under the sun and playing with my real cats are all I need. I do not want any virtual reality to simulate the stimulus or feeling, nor a digital cat that speaks 100 different languages. I want to sweat after a real hard match, enjoying the breeze and sunshine, instead of training in front of the screen with a widget in my hand, and jumping back and forth in the my living room. I want to live a real simple life!
P.S. The picture at the top is a real unedited picture of a beautiful place in China, not AI-generated. None of the writing here has been edited nor assisted by any AI tools.
